It is distant, dynamic and record-breaking. And it’s not even officially a planet. Pluto, the most distant familiar object in the solar system, has a handful of moons, three of which formed four billion years ago, possibly after a giant impact.

Because of the planet’s dramatic 120 degree tilt, it has a huge but ever-shifting set of tropics – regions where the sun is overhead once a day – and it has an atmospheric pressure that varies by a factor of 10,000 over the course of millions of years.

Its surface bears the patterns of flowing liquid, the slow movement of glacial ice, and even evidence of an ancient lake. The betting is that the liquid, the ice and the atmosphere are all nitrogen. So even at temperatures of minus 200C, and at distances so huge that light from the sun takes more than four hours to touch the surface, there is climate change on Pluto.

This new understanding sprang from one brief encounter on 14 July as the Nasa’s New Horizons mission flew past the minor planet - an object so small and so far away no astronomer could detect it until 1930, and so distant that the spacecraft had been travelling for 10 years before reaching it.

“What the data reveal did not surprise us, it shocked us,” said James Green of Nasa, as he introduced the latest findings at the 47th Lunar and Planetary Science conference at Houston.

Pluto already holds one new record: it reflected a radar signal from Earth across a distance of three billion miles, or 33 times the distance between the Earth and the sun. And this record, Cathy Olkin of the Southwest Research Institute told the conference, is unlikely to be broken until 2019, when New Horizons meets an even more distant object in the ever darker regions populated by orbiting comets.

New Horizons also seems to have encountered Pluto at a state between two extremes. Earth has an axial tilt of 23 degrees, which is why the northern and southern hemispheres have alternating summers, and why the Arctic and Antarctic regions are confined. Pluto has a tilt of 120 degrees, and a pattern of slow oscillation that varies by 20 degrees. If Earth were like that, Richard Binzel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the gathering, Houston in Texas would be in the Arctic zone. This slow growth of the tropics and then the polar zones probably drove what passed for climate on Pluto.

And, Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute said, this set of changes may account for the changes in atmospheric pressure: sometimes one hundred thousandth of that on Earth, sometimes 40 times that on Mars. In extreme circumstances, this could reach a point at which nitrogen could exist as liquid, solid and gas – which might explain why the cameras aboard New Horizon caught patterns that looked like the streams, tributaries and rivers that water makes on Earth, along with hints of what on Earth would be glacial flow. Nitrogen rained on the highlands, flowed down to the plains, and even collected as liquid in a lake is the conjecture, although this is based on incomplete data.

There is more to come. Another 40 research papers are being prepared, and huge quantities of information have yet to be telemetered to Earth. “Stay tuned,” Dr Stern told his colleagues, “because this story, like the planet, is evolving.”